by Tessa Boyce
“The following information is provided by Graphiq and MooseRoots.”
Credit: Getty Images
“Divorce is the psychological equivalent of a triple coronary bypass,” journalist Mary Kay Blakely said. For some, this opinion may be all too true. Divorce, while complicated and expensive, is also extremely stressful and has been linked to multiple health problems.
Still, thousands of people make the difficult decision to get divorced every year. Divorce.com reported that today, roughly 50 percent of all marriages in the United States end in divorce. This puts the U.S. in 12th place worldwide for its percentage of marriages that end in divorce, behind countries like the United Kingdom (53 percent) and Moldova (52 percent).
But was the outlook always this bad?
MooseRoots wanted to see how the composition of the divorced population in the United States has changed over time, and which cities have seen the highest increase. Using statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Historic Geographic Information System, MooseRoots calculated the percent change of each state’s divorced population between 1970 and 2010.
There is one notable, ironic exception: Hooker County, Neb., where the divorced population decreased by 1.8 percent from 1970 to 2010. It’s the lightest colored county in the top left of the state.
